


Walking in a Winter Wonderland

by Orockthro



Category: The Man From U.N.C.L.E. (TV)
Genre: Down the Chimney Affair 2015, Gen, Hurt/Comfort
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-13
Updated: 2015-12-13
Packaged: 2018-05-06 10:21:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,250
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5413199
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Orockthro/pseuds/Orockthro
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Illya laughs, or possibly coughs. The sound is less than pleasant. “Napoleon, forging ahead to certain death in an icy landscape. Does this sound familiar?”</p><p>“You’re a riot. Can you feel all your toes?”</p><p>Illya wiggles them, winces, and says, “Unfortunately.”</p><p>  <i>(Or, Napoleon and Illya go on mission that takes them through a treacherous and snowy forest just before the holidays, and are met with challenges on their way)</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	Walking in a Winter Wonderland

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Pactnmmt](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Pactnmmt/gifts).



“The light is going,” Illya notes. They are both huffing and sweating more than is advisable in the climate; both have their mittens off and tucked inside their coats to try to stave off the over-exertion that could lead to sweat and subsequent hypothermia.

“Damn that’s fast. We’re only halfway there.” Napoleon shifts the heavy pack, loaded with explosives, food, and water, higher on his shoulders. The snow is falling thick and wet and collecting on the top of the bag where his body heat isn’t there to melt it. Illya sees him, rolls his eyes, and swats some of the snow off with his are hand.

Illya stuffs his hands, now turning blue at the fingernails, into his coat pockets, looking like a sullen child in a too-big coat. “I’d much rather we just bombed the place from the air and have done with it.”

“Ah, yes, but then our dear Mr. Waverly would string us up by our heels. He promised the German government we wouldn’t harm a single fir tree in this place.” Besides, air raids likely wouldn’t go unnoticed in Germany. And discretion, although inopportune, _is_  the better part of valor. “And aren’t you Russians immune to all this cold?”

The burning look of displeasure Illya shoots him is worth the barb, and Napoleon cracks a wide smile as his partner says, “Our hearts may be made of ice, but our blood is not.”

Their destination, nine miles away and across several dangerous cliffs and valleys that Napoleon would prefer not to cross in full daylight, let alone this damned dusk, is a THRUSH satrapy that is little more than a burgeoning home for flightless birds (the sort interested in global chaos and catastrophe). But left unattended, the position would be exceptionally difficult to uproot.

“You gentlemen are going to nip this in the bud,” Mr. Waverly said over his pipe, two days and three plane trips ago. Mr. Waverly who was, no doubt, tucking into a pot pie and with slippers on his feet, warm in whatever hidden safe house he and Mrs. Waverly bedded down in. Napoleon bites his lips to prevent himself from even thinking words that get him boxed on the ears.

Napoleon stops, shuffles his feet in the awkward snow shoes, and starts again. Unlike his Siberian-blooded friend, he can’t get the hang of the things. He is a city boy, through and through, and tennis rackets tied to his feet do nothing more than slow him down. They certainly don’t keep him above the snow; with every step he sinks in a solid three inches deeper than Illya, and pack or not, he is not _that_  much heavier than the man.

Illya grins at him, again, but he’s somewhat mollified by the snowflakes sticking to his eyelashes, making him look very much like a little boy.

“Here, you take this for awhile, will you? Since you’re so comfortable out here and all that.”

Solo returns the grin, slipping out of the pack’s straps and keeping his feet under him; not an easy task. He keeps trying to shuffle his feet sideways, and the snowshoes only dig in deeper, catch, and try to send him toppling over. Illya takes the pack without comment; there are many good parts of being a senior field agent, not to mention the CEA, and this is certainly one of them.

He stretches out his shoulders; for all that explosives are getting smaller and smaller, the quantity they are bringing is still a heavy burden, both physically and morally. The war between UNCLE and THRUSH is growing more deadly by the week, and this is not the first time they have been instructed to take permanent measures to keep a small situation from growing into a big one. They have the explosive capacity to vaporize every man, woman, and whatever else THRUSH has down there in the blink of an eye.

Napoleon eyes the bag, now on his partner’s back, with a warranted amount of caution. “Be careful, will you.”

“Afraid you’ll lose me? Fish out the lantern will you? We’ll have to keep walking in the night if we want to keep the schedule.”

“If you go up, I go up. Let’s just say your blast radius is larger than usual.”

The lantern, a gas one, is a touch archaic compared to the battery powered flashlights now in vogue, but it is reliable, and he pumps it a few times before lighting it.

“Let there be light,” he says, and passes it to Illya who takes the point position. He is lighter on his feet than Napoleon, even with the pack. The man was probably born with the things tied to his feet. Napoleon narrowly misses tripping yet again, the lip of the snowshoes caught under a crust of ice forming atop the snow.

“You think you are so clever,” his partner quips back, “but even us heathens have heard that one before. Come along, we’ll freeze if we keep still like this.”

That part is hard to argue. The temperature is dropping and Napoleon puts his mittens back on without any reluctance. The landscape takes on a sinister air with the setting sun. Tall fir trees bend inwards with their growing shadows, and the dark, charcoal blue of the snow fades into a gray that seeps everywhere. Shadows melt together, and the whole forest begins to look like a different place, especially with the bobbing lantern light from ahead.

Napoleon spends the first few minutes squinting and following the light and trying to place his feet correctly so he doesn’t plant himself face first in the snow. In the end he gives up and trusts Illya to see what he can’t, following in his footprints exactly.

And so it is somewhat disturbing when those footprints disappear.

Napoleon looks up and finds himself staring at a dark shadow in front of him. For a second he thinks nothing of it; it is darker simply because the lantern light has disappeared. The lantern light has disappeared. He freezes in his step.

“Illya?”

There’s a sound. Possibly a shout. Definitely Illya.

Without the lantern the ambient light is next to nil, and one shadow might be a tree, might be a death trap, and the gaping shadow in front of him is most certainly a chasm, previously hidden by a delicate layer of snow.

“Illya, I need you to make some noise, I can’t find you in the dark without help.”

Another sound, louder, but still impossible to place. Napoleon hadn’t noticed the rush of wind on his hears, or how loud the breeze through the pine needles was until this moment. He curses it, strains, and wishes he had a lantern, a flashlight, a flare, anything out of that pack.

“Again, tovarich!” he shouts, and fumbles his mittens off to unlace his snowshoes. They didn’t prevent Illya from falling through, and they certainly won’t save him. He steps forward without them, and immediately sinks to his knees in the drift. It’s disconcerting not to be able to see, not his hand in front of him, not the snow that trapps his feet, and certainly not Illya.

He struggles forward, trying to feel with his toes for whatever precipice is in front of him. One foot makes it to solid, hard packed snow. Then the next foot. And then, just as he hear’s Illya shout, audibly this time, there is nothing beneath him at all.

*

Fourteen heartbeats, and all he sees is grey, and all he feels is cold. And then there is a sense of up and down, although he isn’t sure which is which. Around him, covering every inch, is snow.

He panics, like he knows he shouldn't. And then stills. He waits, he breathes, and he spits. He hears it hit above him; he is upside down and was seconds away from digging himself deeper into his snowy grave.

When he pops out, breathe fresh but equally cold air, he sees a glow.   
“Illya!”

The glow is a distance away, but emanating from within the mountain of snow he is currently swimming through. He curses his decision to leave the snowshoes behind, as his progress is painfully slow without them.

“Illya?”

When he reaches the glow he digs, armfulls of wet snow coming away. He moves fast; there’s no telling how much air is down there, or how badly Illya is hurt. The gas lantern is still burning, though, which means there is still oxygen.

“Illya, say something.”

He reaches what must be the pocket that Illya is in, because when he hauls away another armful of snow, it collapses inwards again, until he digs and digs some more. He unearths the lantern first, james it into the snow pile to his left until it’s secure, and reaches in, hauling Illya out by what turns out to be his sleeve.

It’s been not ten minutes since he first fell, but Illya’s lips are blue. He struggles to get him out of the snow, and shines the light on him.

“Wake up,” Illya doesn’t so much as flinch. He’s pale, and the snow is pale; even his hair looks washed out and grey. “Come on, damn it.”

There isn’t time to sit around and wait for him to wake up. He shines the lantern around; they’ve dropped a good forty feet off the edge of a cliff that hadn’t been on their map. To his surprise, there’s a square shape not a hundred meters off. Square means not a snow drift, not a pine tree, and they’re still miles from where the THRUSH operation should be.

“Alright, tovarich. Let’s get the show on the road, eh?”

Miraculously, Illya’s snowshoes are still on him, although the pack went missing during the tumble. He forces his own frozen digits to unlace Illya, ignoring the unpleasant limpness of his partner, and struggles to put them on over his own boots. It’s just as well that the pack is lost, although they’ll have to come back for it in daylight. He doubts he would be able to carry both Illya and it, and it precludes him from having to make a decision he knows would not satisfy Mr. Waverly in a report.

While Illya may be a man on the lighter side of the scale in a wrestling match, loaded down with snow and down clothing and an personal arsenal even outside of UNCLE issued weapons, he is no lightweightx. Napoleon groans as he sets his feet wide, bends over, and hoists Illya over his shoulders. He sinks an extra two inches into the snow.

In order to hold the lantern he can only hang onto Illya with one hand, and so his trek the hundred yards to the rectangular shape he prays is a shack, is a long one. “Just hang on and maybe the misses of that place will have soup on,” he says to the lump on his shoulder.

Napoleon doubts it; there isn’t any light or smoke or anything indicating life, at least above ground. They’ll be lucky if it isn’t a THRUSH enclave expanding their territory.

But Solo luck, for all that the office staff call it superstition, is with him once again. The square grows larger, until it’s clear that the bit on the top is a chimney, and the bit to the side is a cedar shake roof covered in snow, and although there is no light on the inside, the door is half off its hinges. The cabin, a skiing cabin likely, is abandoned.

He gets Illya settled in the cot pushed against the edge of the single-room cabin, sweeps as much of the drifted-in snow back outside as he can manage, and hangs the lantern from the ceiling.

“Home sweet home.”

*

Illya is still unconscious by the time Napoleon has filled the fireplace with the snow-damp wood that had been piled up under the window, said a prayer, and let the thing light, and although the air is smoky, it is warm.

He takes his coat off, strings it up to dry above the fireplace, and starts to do the same with Illya’s clothing. He’s soaked to the bone, and Napoleon works faster when he touches Illya’s hand and comes away cold and clammy.  He works him out of his coat without too much trouble, and then his vest and shirt. His undershirt is dry, so Napoleon leaves him in his boxers and t-shirt, but even with the fire now crackling, he will doubtless continue to freeze. Hell, even moving around and with his own shirt still dry enough to wear, Napoleon is cold. Illya, if he were awake, would be complaining endlessly.

The cabin has one blanket, a wool thing that is hardly the cashmere Napoleon wishes it were. But it will have to do. He gathers Illya up off the bed and carries him to sit in front of the fire, arranging him awkwardly so he faces the flames, and his back is tucked up flush to Napoleon’s chest. Then he wraps the both of them in the blanket.

“You would laugh. We’re like your Russian Nesting dolls,” he says to Illya’s hair. It’s damp and dirty and, like the rest of him, somewhat unpleasant smelling, the sweat of their day long hike having taken root. Napoleon is sure he doesn't smell like a rose either.

He sits there, chaffing Illya’s arms and hands under the blanket to try to return some circulation, all the while keeping an eye on his feet lest they actually burn from being so close to the fire, contemplating how different this would be if anyone else were here with him.

If it were a fresh agent, green or maybe just incompetent, he likely would have left him behind in search of the pack. After all, it is now highly unlikely that they will complete their mission. But Illya is his partner, not just some random assignment for an affair. Mr. Waverly likes to remind them, frequently, that they are all but cogs in the greater UNCLE machine. They are all expendable. Napoleon is happy to lie on his report. “The pack was long gone, sir, and there was no hope of retrieving it.” It’s not even a complete lie; he doesn’t have the first clue where it ended up. But looking would have meant sending Illya to his grave.

He shifts, and Illya stirs a bit; a good sign.

If he was here with April, any of the women agents, or even Angelique, it would be different, too. The fire wouldn’t be the only heat, and he grins a little at the thought. But he would trade all of that to have Illya at his back, and has done so more than once.

“You back with me?”

Illya groans a bit, and tries to reach for his face.

“You still have your ears, if that’s what you’re worried about. No frostbite at all, from what I can tell.”

“Napoleon?”

“Were you expecting someone else?”

Illya laughs, or possibly coughs. The sound is less than pleasant. “Napoleon, forging ahead to certain death in an icy landscape. Does this sound familiar?”

“You’re a riot. Can you feel all your toes?”

Illya wiggles them, winces, and says, “Unfortunately.” He looks around for awhile, clearly getting his bearings under him before he adds, “the pack isn’t here.”

“No. Ah, no it isn’t. I’m afraid it was a casualty of your tumble.”

“Drat.”

“Quite.”

They sit in silence for awhile, Illya clearly unwilling to give up either his prime location next to the fire, nor his ability to suck the heat from Napoleon, too. Eventually he says, “I’m roasting. Unhand me, will you?”

They untangle from one another; the air on the other side of the blanket is startling, and they both are shivering violently within a matter of seconds. “Still roasting?”

“You’re a riot,” Illya parrots back at him, glaring and squinting all at once. “I wish we had a painkiller. All in the pack, I assume?”

“Unfortunately. Headache?”

“I believe me and the pack had a meeting of minds. A concussive one.”

He sits himself on the cot, stretches limbs that Napoleon aches on behalf of, and then looks around, still squinting, although the light from the fire and the lantern is hardly vibrant.

“Napoleon, do you ever get the feeling you’re being watched?”

“Often. But then again, I’m a spy.”

“Hmm,” Illya says, and lays flat on the cot, pulling the blanket off the floor to cover him.

“Mind sharing?”

Illya eyes him up and down. “Your shirt is dry. And your brain is not swollen. The blanket is mine.”

Napoleon scoots closer to the fire and throws on another log. It pops and fizzles at the ice and snow explosively evaporates. “Fine. Try not to sleep, though.”

“Hmmm....”

“Illya?”

“Hm.”

“Just checking.”

The night passes slowly. Napoleon slips into strange half sleeps, waking as soon as his chin hits his chest, and stoking the fire. There is enough firewood here to last the night, but no more, barely enough to dry their clothes by morning. They will need to leave promptly as soon as it’s light out. Even if they had enough firewood to last a year, no doubt the smoke has alerted THRUSH to their presence.

“Illya?”

“Alive. Annoyed.”

“Good.”

When dawn finally begins to break, Napoleon almost doesn’t notice. The light is pink, rather than gold and orange, and that’s what catches his attention.

“Illya?”

“Please, for the love of your god, let me sleep. I am not bleeding into my brain. Or, at least, probably not.”

“Ah, it’s morning.”

The lump of blankets peel back and Illya blinks at him. “Truly?

“Would I lie to you?”

Illya stretches and squints one eye at him in his peculiar fashion. “Probably. But the sun doesn’t.”

“Let’s go. Our things are dry enough, and we need to find that pack and get on our way before someone else decides to investigate this mysteriously inhabited abandoned cabin.”

Illya shuffles into his boots and clothes, and Napoleon follows suit. He is half into his hat when he hears the explosion. He sits down abruptly, and the shingles vibrate. Illya is standing over him, one hand on his shoulder and the other keeping the lantern from catapulting onto the floor and shattering.

“You don’t think...”

Napoleon swallows. “That a certain THRUSH birdie happened upon our pack and went to open his presents this morning?”

“Surely we are not this lucky.”

Solo grins at him, pulls himself up using Illya as a crutch, and says, “My dear Illya, I think this time we are. What do you say we hoof it out of here and find ourselves some egg nog to share with Lisa Rogers?”

Illya makes a face, and straightens Napoleon’s hat on his head for him. “You know she spikes it.”

Napoleon grins wider and he winks. “Truly?”

“You are terrible, Napoleon. Put your shoes on. I don’t want to have to tell Mr. Waverly I lost you in a snowbank. Some namesakes just aren’t quite worth living up to.”

“You know he didn’t actually die on the Russian front, right?”

“Come on, Napoleon.”

Napoleon smiles, straightens his hat again, and steps out into the cold after his partner. If they walk fast, and avoid falling into any more ravines, there’s an outside chance they’ll make it back for Christmas. And Napoleon is feeling lucky.


End file.
